Congress cut spending, but still has to decide which programs and agencies will receive less money.

Really, that's where the rubber always meets the road. And the deadline for making those tough choices is just around the corner.

The next fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, and legislators are still light years from putting together a spending plan for next year.

And this new bill -- which cuts spending -- is being dropped into the appropriations process at what amounts to the last minute.

"It's now August," said Craig Jennings, federal fiscal policy director at OMB Watch, which monitors federal spending. "They have to get this done by the end of September, and the Senate hasn't done anything."

Complicating matters is the fact that Congress has to actually cut spending, rather than increase it.

Meanwhile, a senior senator from the Pacific Northwest will have very different spending priorities than a newly elected House member from Florida, and those differences are highlighted when it's time for the federal government to dole out money.

"Congress still has to do the usual fighting," said Jennings. "They still have to break down spending for each agency, and there are still going to be disputes between the House and Senate."

That sounds an awful lot like what happened with the fiscal 2011 budget, when the normal appropriations process degenerated into a protracted battle that brought the government to the edge of a shutdown.

Of course, short-term spending bills are nothing new. Congress has enacted at least one every year for all but three of the past 30. But seven in one year was unprecedented, and indicative of partisan gridlock.

The latest will expire on the last day of September, a deadline now just weeks away. Because lawmakers have made such little progress on setting agency funding levels, it now seems a short-term bill is a guaranteed.

Jennings said there is the potential for another food fight -- especially if Republicans consider the spending caps to be a ceiling, rather than the target level of spending.

"If Republicans want to go lower than the caps, they can do that," Jennings said.